Each time the award-winning video journalist has attempted to re-enter the United States, border patrol has detained her, according to a lawsuit she filed against the United States government on Monday. That’s more than 50 occasions in total.

Why? That’s her question, too. Poitras, creator of the Oscar-, Pulitzer-, and Academy Award-winning documentary Citizenfour--which chronicles the exploits of the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden--desires to know why security agents repeatedly harassed her during that period when she was working on her films.

Apparently, she had been told during one of many hours-long detainments that her name appeared on a national security threat database. After filing Freedom of Information Act requests for her records, she received few clarifying details. So she’s taking legal action.

Poitras will take the departments of justice and homeland security, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to court. She has demanded access to the surveillance records that pertain to her.

"I'm filing this lawsuit because the government uses the U.S. border to bypass the rule of law," Poitras said in a statement. "This simply should not be tolerated in a democracy. I am also filing this suit in support of the countless other less high-profile people who have also been subjected to years of Kafkaesque harassment at the borders. We have a right to know how this system works and why we are targeted."

That’s the feeling “Project Seen“ is designed to evoke. The new typeface, created by Slovenian artist Emil Kozole, automatically parses the words you type and strikes through potentially sensitive ones.

What causes a word to be stricken? The redaction list draws from a catalogue of words that supposedly trip the snoop alarms. “These words are part of an NSAPrismdatabase of terms originally leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 that are used like a surveillance scoring system by government spy agencies,” says Fast Company.

In any case, Kozole’s font is an art project. And any phrase that might--according to the logic of the so-called “spookwords“--be deemed suspicious to an NSA analyst, or NSA algorithm for that matter, gets crossed out. Like NSA, for instance.

“This system highlights where you are potentially prone to being surveilled whilst also preventing you from potentially being tracked,” Kozolewrites on his blog. “Seen is an experiment of evasive and reflexive techniques around the topic of online privacy.”

Surveillance and the Internet are, no doubt, inextricably linked. As crypto expert and author Bruce Schneier will tell you, the former is the business model of the latter. The threat to privacy is real. Whether that be some big tech company parsing and logging your email communications for terms to advertise against, or some government agency such as the NSA piggybacking on those databases to gather intelligence.

Think you’re too normal to be the subject of scrutiny? As long as you don’t go fedexing cyanidepackages of cyberpunkIlluminati to redheads in Texas? Not so. As the artist Kozoletells Business Insider: “I still wanted to show and educate people on how 'normal' words we use in our online conversations on Facebook, emails or search queries on Google are all stored and could potentially get you in trouble.”

For that reason, the author has opted to retain all instances where the “Project Seen” typeface would typographically shish kabob his text.

It is, as aforementioned, unsettling to have a ghostly censor embedded in the very medium through which one writes. A bowdlerizing phantom probing your every keypunch. It’s spooky--in all senses of the word.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/07/14/typeface-nsa-surveillance/feed/0Screen Shot 2015-07-14 at 1.57.55 PMrhhackettfortuneExclusive: cybersecurity startup RedOwl raises $17 million series bhttp://fortune.com/2015/07/13/redowl-17-million-series-b/
http://fortune.com/2015/07/13/redowl-17-million-series-b/#commentsMon, 13 Jul 2015 13:00:22 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1205630]]>Sure, Guy Filippelli did a stint with the National Security Agency. As a member of that spy team, he helped re-architect how the agency disseminated intelligence to military officers. But that’s not where Filippelli cut his teeth.

“Actually, the army was much more formative for me,” the CEO and founder of cybersecurity startup RedOwl tells Fortune. In late 2001, Filippelli, by then a West Point grad with experience in computer science, had been gearing up for the United States’ post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. The military’s intelligence apparatus was technologically lacking at the time, he says, and so the top brass selected a few young army officers to run software engineering teams, to boost officers’ decision-making capabilities. That’s when Filippelli got his start.

“In the army, nobody is gathering intelligence just to gather intelligence,” he says, hinting at an essential difference between the missions of his former employers. “An army intelligence team’s goal is to quickly get data together and to turn that into information that can be actioned in support of a decision on the battlefield.” The job entails gathering relevant details quickly, correctly, and serving them up to the leaders devising strategies. During conflict, lives depend on it.

Today, Filippelli is applying that insight at RedOwl, a cloud-based behavioral analytics software company he founded in 2011 after leaving the public sector. The Baltimore, Md.-based firm specializes in bringing together disparate streams of data within an organization. They could include activity on the IT network, email exchanges, and other sources of data, in order to help companies mitigate insider risk--which could manifest as a rogue, sloppy, or compromised employee, for example.

On Monday, RedOwl will announce that is has raised a $17 million Series B round of funding, bringing total funding to nearly $30 million so far. Participants in the latest round include Allegis Capital, a venture capital firm, which led the raise, as well as Blackstone Group BX, the private equity firm, and angel investor Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of sales-tool giant Salesforce CRM. The company already has a relationship with In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Soon after contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA internal documents in 2013, Filippelli says that RedOwl’s appeal leaped from a “nice to have” to a “need to have” among potential customers. The company’s flagship product, “reveal,” monitors users, spots anomalies, predicts malfeasance, and gives the operators a chance to stop data heists before they happen.

Post-Snowden, network custodians began to consider blocking compromises from within just as important as preventing external attacks. Information security specialists became suddenly introspective. Their newly heightened fears no doubt helped RedOwl to win the “most innovative company” award at the 2014 RSA Conference, one of the world’s biggest information security confabs.

“Statistics show that between 70-and-80% of cyber breaches have an internal component to them,” says Robert Ackerman, the lead investor at Allegis Capital and newly added board member at RedOwl, as he details his reasoning behind the investment. “All of a sudden, people have come to realize the critical need to understand what’s going on inside their networks.”

That threat is real. According to a 2015 insider threat report from Vormetric, 89% of the 800 business and IT managers surveyed by the San Jose, Calif.-based data security firm reported feeling that their organizations are vulnerable to insider attacks. Indeed, more than a third of the respondents said they felt “extremely vulnerable.”

Jay Leek, Blackstone’s chief information security officer and a RedOwl board member since April, sings the company’s praises. On a call with Fortune, the customer-turned-investor says he spent 11 months reviewing 15 companies with similar cybersecurity offerings last year before giving RedOwl his endorsement. (He declined to name the other companies.)

RedOwl stole the show, he says. The tool “gives you the full context and allows you to pivot and investigate quickly,” he waxes. Other tools, he says, simply would alert him to indicators of compromise.

“Investigating used to take days,” he adds. “Now it takes 5 minutes or less. It’s a tremendous time saver.”

RedOwl isn’t the only company operating in the space. Big data crunching companies like Palantir and Splunk SPLK help organizations dig through data and find trends that could unmask insider threats. (Just last week, Splunk bought cybersecurity startup Caspida for $190 million, giving it even better prospects in the security market.) And then there are others, such as Securonix and Gurucal, competing for a share of the pie, to name a couple.

Filippelli, who previously co-founded the data analytics firm Berico Technologies, says the bulk of RedOwl’s latest funding injection will go toward product development. “This has been a very intense year for us,” he says, mentioning that he has been pleased with several proof of concept tests of the technology. (He does not go into greater detail.) Some of the firm’s customers so far include Blackstone and risk management firm K2 Intelligence.

“Really, 2015 is fundamentally about establishing these early beachheads, to use a military term, in these large organizations,” Filippelli says. By end of year, he says he hopes to have 25 product level deployments, declining to reveal further information about customers or revenue. RedOwl will continue to focus for now on its tech, he says, primarily hiring engineers and data scientists. Since the middle of last year, the company’s headcount has doubled to 35, and he hopes to bring that number to 50 by year end.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/07/13/redowl-17-million-series-b/feed/0RedOwl 2015 websiterhhackettfortuneEric Holder suggests Edward Snowden could come back to U.S.http://fortune.com/2015/07/06/edward-snowden-eric-holder/
http://fortune.com/2015/07/06/edward-snowden-eric-holder/#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 22:18:35 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1201380]]>A “possibility exists” for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to someday leave asylum in Russia and return to the U.S., former Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview with Yahoo News published Monday.

Snowden’s been living in Russia since 2013, when he leaked a stream of classified federal government documents that exposed surveillance activities by the NSA. His disclosures sparked heated discussions over the role of private companies in government surveillance and the scope of such surveillance.

The U.S. has revoked Snowden’s passport; Holder filed a criminal complaint against Snowden in June as well.

“We are in a different place as a result of the Snowden disclosures,” Holder said in the interview. The revelations spurred important debates and discussions, he added.

However, the chief spokeswoman for the current Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, has already shot down Holder’s suggestion that the Department of Justice could offer Snowden a pathway back to the U.S. “This is an ongoing case so I am not going to get into specific details but I can say our position regarding bringing Edward Snowden back to the United States to face charges has not changed," the spokeswoman said in an email to Yahoo News.

Unlike many other companies, Apple says it doesn’t want to exploit users’ data and turn it into revenue. Whether the company’s stance is genuine or purely a marketing strategy to differentiate itself is, at the moment, not important as long as Apple does indeed resist collecting and selling customer data as its business model, Snowden said, adding that it’s a stance and model we should encourage other companies to adopt.

Said Snowden:

And we should support vendors who are willing to innovate. Who are willing to take positions like that, and go "You know, just because it's popular to collect everybody's information and resell it … to advertisers and whatever, it's going to serve our reputation, it's going to serve our relationship with our customers, and it's going to serve society better. If instead we just align ourselves with our customers and what they really want, if we can outcompete people on the value of our products without needing to subsidize that by information that we've basically stolen from our customers, that's absolutely something that should be supported. And regardless of whether it's honest or dishonest, for the moment, now, that's something we should support, that's something we should incentivize, and it's actually something we should emulate.

He added that now that Apple has taken a public stance on the issue, going back on its word later on will be even more damaging in the eyes of consumers as it would be “a betrayal of a promise.”

In the past year, Apple has been forced to address privacy issues, especially following the iCloud hack that exposed some celebrities’ personal photos.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/17/edward-snowden-apple-privacy/feed/0Edward Snowden Speaks To The GuardiankiakokalitchevaThis interview encapsulates why everyone is outraged about the controversial Sunday Times’ Snowden storyhttp://fortune.com/2015/06/16/sunday-times-snowden/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/sunday-times-snowden/#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 13:37:56 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1176836]]>In case you missed it, a front page story in the UK-based Sunday Times magazine generated a furor this weekend. It covered the purported repercussions of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks for western intelligence agencies. The report--which relied heavily on unnamed “senior officials” and “senior government sources”--parroted a number of unsubstantiated claims, according to its critics, hammering home a single point of view: that of the British government.

Among other things, the piece alleged that China and Russia had “cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden,” and that the British spy agency MI6 had been forced “to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries.” It also ham-handedly insinuated that Snowden had either willingly handed his trove of state secrets over to foreign governments in exchange for asylum, or had lost his documents to them through some other means, such as hacking. All of these suppositions are unproven or tenuously contended, manyhavepointedout.

To critics, it seems the Sunday Times’ journalists bought into an unsupported, one-sided narrative spun by its anonymous informants.

When an official tells the Sunday Times that "it is the case that Russians and Chinese have information,” no nod is given to the possibility that that information might be the same information to which everyone gained access following the Snowden leaks. The strange tautology is followed by another self-defeating quote, which nullifies an earlier accusation that Snowden has “blood on his hands.” To wit, that “there is no evidence of anyone being harmed."

“This sort of credulous regurgitation of government statements is antithetical to good journalism,” derided Ryan Gallagher, a Scottish investigative security reporter, in his critical review of the piece. “The entire report is a self-negating joke,” spat Glenn Greenwald, editor of The Intercept and one of the Pulitzer prize-winning reporters who helped shepherd Snowden’s leaks to the public. Whatever happened to good old fashioned journalistic skepticism, the pair ask?

In an interview with Tom Harper, one of the controversial Snowden story’s three reporters (the other two are Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman), CNN reporter George Howell uses less invective to dismantle the foundations of the story’s claims. You can watch Harper’s doomed attempt to quell critics’ concerns on CNN here:

Asked how the government officials knew Snowden’s cache of documents had been compromised (again, an unproven assertion), Harper says: “I don’t know the answer to that, George. All we know is that this is, effectively, the official position of the British government.”

Howell presses on. He asks Harper to explain whether Snowden had been hacked or had willingly turned over leaked documents to the Chinese and Russian governments.”Well, again. Sorry to just repeat myself, George, but we don’t know,” Harper says. “When you’re dealing with the world of intelligence, there are so many unknowns and so many possibilities, it’s difficult to state anything with certainty.”

Howell proceeds to deflate the steadily swelling ball of hot air surrounding the story’s reportage with a question as sharp as a pinpoint: “Essentially, you’re reporting what the government is saying, but as far as the evidence to substantiate it, you’re not really able to comment or explain that at this point, right?”

“No.”

Pity no nameless members of the Home Office were present to chime in.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/sunday-times-snowden/feed/0CNN George Howell Tom Harper Sunday Times Snowden interview 2015rhhackettfortuneNSA spying is going to cost the tech sector much more than we thoughthttp://fortune.com/2015/06/09/surveillance-tech-sector/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/09/surveillance-tech-sector/#commentsTue, 09 Jun 2015 18:33:20 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1167246]]>NSA surveillance is going to cost the U.S. tech sector a lot more than originally thought.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C. -based think tank that advocates for policies that nurture technology innovation, has released a new report in which it raises its previous estimate of how much surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community could cost U.S. tech companies.

In 2013, the non-partisan group estimated that the NSA-related revelations stemming from Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak would scare away foreign customers in the cloud computer sector to the tune of as much as $35 billion in business. The new report says that figure is too low, and that the economic reverberations will “likely far exceed” that initial $35 billion estimate, although the report wasn't more specific on a final figure. “The reason we can’t cap it is because there’s no end in sight [to the losses],” Daniel Castro, a co-writer of the study, said in an interview with Fortune. Without action on the part of the U.S. government to limit the surveillance practices that concern foreign tech clients, Castro said foreign markets will continue to penalize U.S. companies.

American tech companies saw a slump in sales after Snowden set off a chain of disclosures that revealed the widespread nature of U.S. surveillance, such as the PRISM program that gave the intelligence community access to private online communications.

According to the report, U.S. companies -- including IBM IBM, Microsoft MSFT, and Cisco CSCO -- all saw drops in their sales in China after reports that said the NSA program built backdoors into encryption products. The report says many countries are now looking to enact -- or have already enacted -- tougher policies for American tech companies operating on their soil. Russia, for example, has enacted laws that require companies to store data domestically. And a new Chinese regulation established this January forces tech companies to submit to audits and build encryption keys in their products.

“When historians write about this period in U.S. history it could very well be that one of the themes will be how the United States lost its global technology leadership to other nations,” wrote the study’s authors, Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn. “This is the biggest threat to the dominance of the U.S. tech sector,” Castro said.

President Barack Obama this week signed into law tighter restrictions for the agency, barring the organization from mass collection and storage of American phone records. Snowden, the man who revealed these practices to the public, is in the New York Times Friday, celebrating the work of Congress and the President as a “profound” achievement, and “a historic victory for the rights of every citizen.” Still, Snowden believes surveillance reform has a long way to go.

Here are some other choice quotes from the article:

Snowden had worried at one point that he might have, “put [his] privileged lives at risk for nothing -- that the public would react with indifference, or practiced cynicism, to the revelations.” But the changes to the law have, in part, vindicated his decision to risk imprisonment by leaking classified information

He calls this weeks events, “only the latest product of a change in global awareness,” citing other events like The U.N. declaring “mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights,” as evidence of a broader movement to curtail spying powers.

He also laments that there is more work to do. Writes Snowden: “the right to privacy . . . remains under threat. Some of the world's most popular online services have been enlisted as partners in the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance programs, and technology companies are being pressured by governments around the world to work against their customers rather than for them.”

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/05/edward-snowden-privacy-oped/feed/0TEC05.01.15 SnowdenchristopherrmatthewsNSA quietly expanded Internet snooping powers, leaked documents showhttp://fortune.com/2015/06/05/nsa-fbi-internet-spying/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/05/nsa-fbi-internet-spying/#commentsFri, 05 Jun 2015 13:27:10 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1159716]]>A new jointreport from the New York Times and ProPublica that cites classified documents reveals that the Obama administration secretly granted the National Security Agency additional authorities to spy on the international Internet communications of Americans in order to seek out hacking attacks from abroad. The expanded powers, which aimed to help the agency seek out and squelch foreign-born cyber intrusions, had not been previously disclosed to the public.

The latest news comes from the trove of documents provided by NSA contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden. As this set divulges: In May 2012, the Justice Department approved the NSA to target Internet traffic bearing “certain signatures,” or activity correlating to cyber attacks. Two months later, the department allowed the agency to target communications based on IP addresses.

Those permissions boosted the agency’s collection capabilities. The NSA had already been able to use email addresses and phone numbers to conduct its surveillance activities, the pair of news outlets points out. But by mid-2012, executive branch had “started allowing the agency to search its communications streams for less-identifying Internet protocol addresses or strings of harmful computer code.”

The report also reveals that the NSA desired to sidestep the thorny problem of cyber attack attribution, which tended to impede its surveillance. An NSA newsletter dated late March 2012 describes a proposal that would allow the NSA to collect data indiscriminately at the nation’s digital borders, without requiring attribution to terrorist groups or foreign governments. Instead, the updated provision would require only “that a selector be tied to malicious cyber activity.”

The augmented authority “will fill a huge collection gap against cyber threats to the nation,” the newsletter declared, noting that its approval was one of then-NSA director General Keith B. Alexander’s “highest priorities.”

That approval didn’t exactly pan out. While the NSA did not, apparently, win the right to target communications in the absence of evidence associating them with other nations and radical organizations, it still was able to greatly broaden its collection schemes through “targeting cyber signatures,” such as IP address and strings of code, as aforementioned.

This quiet expansion of powers was not isolated to the NSA either. The Federal Bureau of Investigation benefitted, too.

As the two agencies’ relationship has grown tighter over the years, the FBI was, also starting in 2012, able to tap into the NSA’s electronic surveillance program at international communications “chokepoints operated by U.S. providers,” another document reveals. While all of the collected information would be intended to combat foreign threats, it could easily ensnare Americans. Plus, any of the collected data could then be used by prosecutors in criminal cases, the Times notes.

When the Times asked the FBI for comment, the bureau directed the paper “to its existing procedures for protecting victims' data acquired during investigations,” says the Times. The bureau added that it has “continually reviewed its policies ‘to adapt to these changing threats while protecting civil liberties and the interests of victims of cybercrimes.’"

Still, the NSA’s methodology for selecting targets remains unclear. And, as the Times notes, through this program the NSA almost certainly would have been scooping up oodles of sensitive American data as a result, since monitoring cyber thieves necessarily involves tracking and copying the information they’re looting.

An NSA lawyer, acknowledging this point in another leaked document, had recommended separating that information out from the rest of the NSA’s data collection programs--making it “available only to those who have the mission to collect/report on these types of foreign intrusions”--since it can contain “so much” information on U.S. persons.

Knowledge of the agency’s boosted warrantless snooping privileges comes just as the ink on the USA Freedom Act--a partial replacement of the USA Patriot Act, which largely authorized the NSA’s bulk data collection program--is barely dry. As more such revelations come to light, expect the debate over Internet surveillance between national security-minded government officials and privacy advocates to continue to play out.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/06/05/nsa-fbi-internet-spying/feed/0Nat'l Security Agency Director Attends AEI Discussion On CybersecurityrhhackettfortuneSteve Wozniak: Edward Snowden is ‘a hero to me’http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/steve-wozniak-edward-snowden/
http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/steve-wozniak-edward-snowden/#commentsTue, 26 May 2015 14:03:48 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1136547]]>Steve Wozniak reaffirmed his staunch support for digital privacy in an interview over the weekend in which the Apple co-founder called National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden “a hero.”

Wozniak, who helped build Apple AAPL with Steve Jobs before leaving the tech giant in the mid-1980’s, has expressed an affinity for Snowden in the past. Over the weekend, Wozniak reiterated his admiration for Snowden in an interview with tech news site ITP.net in which the inventor said Snowden “gave up his own life . . . to help the rest of us.”

Wozniak went on to tell the publication more on his feelings about Snowden:

“‘Total hero to me; total hero,’ he gushes. ‘Not necessarily [for] what he exposed, but the fact that he internally came from his own heart, his own belief in the United States Constitution, what democracy and freedom was about. And now a federal judge has said that NSA data collection was unconstitutional.'”

Two years ago, Wozniak favorably compared Snowden to Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Last year, Wozniak also told reporters that he briefly met Snowden at a small event in Moscow, where the former NSA employee is currently living.

Wozniak has expressed some regret in the past for the role technology has played in allowing the government to expand its surveillance efforts. “We didn’t realize that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren’t,” Wozniak told CNN in 2013.

(Correction: This article originally misidentified the source of Wozniak’s interview, which originally appeared on ITP.net and was only later published on that website’s sister site, ArabianBusiness.com. The article has been corrected.)

“Do you miss pizza? Favorite thing about Russia so far? If you could be an insect, which would you be and why?” a Reddit user asked Snowden in a recent AMA, or “Ask Me Anything.” Snowden’s response was short and sweet: “This guy gets it. Russia has Papa John’s. For real.”

But Snowden also took the opportunity to answer questions on more serious subjects. After all, the conversation was centered around Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That’s one section Snowden brought to the public’s attention in 2013 when he leaked information about the NSA’s telephone records collection program.

It represents a sea change from a few years ago, when intrusive new surveillance laws were passed without any kind of meaningful opposition or debate. Whatever you think about Rand Paul or his politics, it’s important to remember that when he took the floor to say “No” to any length of reauthorization of the Patriot Act, he was speaking for the majority of Americans — more than 60% of whom want to see this kind of mass surveillance reformed or ended.

Snowden conducted the Reddit conversation along with Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/edward-snowden-pizza/feed/0The New Yorker Festival 2014 - Edward Snowden Interviewed by Jane MayersnyderfortuneEdward Snowden’s most outlandish interview yethttp://fortune.com/2015/04/06/snowden-oliver-hbo/
http://fortune.com/2015/04/06/snowden-oliver-hbo/#commentsMon, 06 Apr 2015 17:11:49 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=1067660]]>Edward Snowden, the whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor, has conducted lots of interviews since he shocked the world with revelations about top secret government surveillance programs and fled to Russia. He’s video-streamed his visage onto a big screen at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas (as well as a smaller one). He’s appeared on panels, including what became the final public appearance of the celebrated New York Times media columnist David Carr. He’s wandered the halls of the TED conference on the screen of a telepresence robot.

But this weekend on John Oliver’s hit HBO series Last Week Tonight, Snowden participated in what is likely his kookiest interview to date. The show took a deep dive into government surveillance, a subject nearly two years in the public spotlight thanks to Snowden’s leaks, and encompassed subjects ranging from the Patriot Act and espionage to, er, “truck nuts” and “dick pics.”

You can think that Snowden did the wrong thing or did it in the wrong way, but the fact is we have this information now and we no longer get the luxury of pleading ignorance. It’s like you can’t go to SeaWorld and pretend that Shamoo is happy anymore when we all know at least half the water in the tank is whale tears. We know that now. You can’t un-know that information, so you have to bear that in mind.

But here’s the thing. It’s almost two years later and it seems like we’ve kind of forgotten to have a debate over the content of what Snowden leaked.

“The public debate so far has been absolutely pathetic,” Oliver adds.

In a world where 1-in-10 smartphone owners have no awareness of the Snowden & NSA revelations, according to a recent privacy awareness study by the security firm Lookout, there’s no doubt that that public debate could use more stimulus. (Having seen Oliver’s “man-on-the-street” interviews in Times Square with people who--either laughably, or alarmingly--have a very confused understanding about Snowden’s revelations, one must question whether the respondents who indicated “yes” on the Lookout survey even have their facts straight.)

Though Oliver chastens the public for not engaging in a more serious dialogue about government surveillance, his treatment is not without its moments of levity.

John Oliver: Do you miss Hot Pockets?

Edward Snowden: Yes, I miss Hot Pockets very much.

Anyway, here’s the video.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/04/06/snowden-oliver-hbo/feed/0Oliver and Snowden high fiverhhackettfortuneStudy: Americans lament loss of privacy, but still share freely onlinehttp://fortune.com/2014/11/12/study-americans-lament-loss-of-privacy-but-still-share-freely-online/
http://fortune.com/2014/11/12/study-americans-lament-loss-of-privacy-but-still-share-freely-online/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 00:29:10 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=863990]]>Whether it’s a fear of government rifling through personal e-mails or corporations tracking shopping habits, Americans seem to feel that their privacy is under siege – especially online. But, that doesn’t mean we’ll stop sharing private information on the Internet.

An overwhelming majority of Americans are worried about losing control of their privacy, particularly when it comes to personal details they post on social networking sites, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. But most people seem to find it difficult to abstain from putting their information online.

The idea that government monitors routine correspondence emerged from the realm of conspiracy theories to, essentially, a foregone conclusion after Edward Snowden leaked confidential documents detailing NSA surveillance last year. The Pew report, which surveyed more than 600 adult Americans, found that 87% of respondents had heard at least something in the news or elsewhere about the government’s efforts to monitor potential terrorist activity by gathering information about the public’s telephone calls, e-mails and other forms of communication.

What’s more, it seems that most Americans now feel that their own privacy is more or less out of their hands when it comes to the government or businesses trolling for information. The Pew study, titled “Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era,” found that a whopping 91% of people surveyed feel to some degree that consumers can no longer control how companies access their personal information and how it is put to use. And, 80% of respondents either “agree” or “strongly agree” with the sentiment that government monitoring of personal phone calls and Internet correspondence is a cause for worry.

When it comes to social media, 80% of those surveyed are worried about marketers and companies getting a hold of the information they post online while 70% are at least somewhat concerned that the government is monitoring their social media presence without their permission.

In fact, the survey’s respondents felt the least comfortable when using social media sites, with 81% saying that the did not feel secure sharing private information on social media. That’s compared to 67% of people who said they feel at least somewhat secure sharing information over a landline telephone.

Still, users’ concerns don’t necessarily stop them from sharing information online. More than half of the survey’s respondents said they have shared information or posted comments online using either their real name or a screen name that is associated with them. Only 42% of respondents said they have shared information online anonymously.

“Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it,” Schmidt said during a hearing in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

The hearing on Wednesday came weeks before a potential Congressional vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would stop the NSA from collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens. The event was designed to gin up public support for the legislation while giving Silicon Valley executives a venue to vent about how recent revelations about government spying threaten their businesses.

For years, Sen. Wyden had suggested the NSA was engaged in questionable surveillance practices. But it was not until former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked top-secret documents last year, confirming widespread monitoring of online communications, did the issue gain worldwide attention.

“In 2011 on the floor of the United States Senate, I warned that people were going to be stunned and angry when they found out how the U.S. government has been secretly applying its surveillance authority,” Sen. Wyden said. “And it turned out I was right about that.”

The event, held in the gym of Palo Alto High School, was carefully choreographed as an outlet for outrage at government surveillance. Executives were uniformly critical of the NSA, mostly answering softball questions lobbed by Sen. Wyden, who had attended the school long before the Internet industry grew up around it.

The scene, itself, was a bit surreal. Over 100 high school students sat on the basketball court in the bleachers as executives spoke and, at one point, interrupted the proceedings by leaving en masse after the school bell rang to signal the end of a class period.

Revelations about the surveillance have tarnished the reputations of many Silicon Valley companies. Some documents have suggested that U.S. tech giants were complicit in handing huge amounts of customer information to the federal government, an accusation that the executives vehemently deny. Rather, they say they only respond to legal demands for user data. Any wholesale surveillance, they insist, was done without their help or knowledge.

Whether the companies should even be collecting so much personal data never came up. Digital rights groups have been particularly critical of the practice, saying it leaves users vulnerable.

“You own the email or text messages or content you create,” Smith said, eliciting applause from the audience. “Even if when you put your content on our data centers, you still own it, and you're entitled to the legal protections from the Constitution. That's one of the reasons we need Congress to act.”

Many tech executives have voiced concerns about customers defecting to other services or foreign companies avoiding their products because of the NSA surveillance. To them, the issue is more of a matter of profits than a legal debate.

U.S. tech companies could lose as much as $35 billion through 2016 because of canceled contracts and opportunities stemming from the NSA scandal, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

According to a report released by the Open Technology Institute in July, 26% of Americans polled said they began shopping and banking online less after learning of the NSA’s activities. Meanwhile, countries like India, Brazil and Germany have since argued for so-called “data localization.”The practice, if enforced, would require tech companies to store data in countries from which it was collected. Data for a Facebook user in India, for example, would have to remain in that country where it would, in theory, be safer from U.S. spy agencies. As it is, U.S. tech companies like Google and Microsoft MSFT store data where ever they want.

Storing data internationally would not only increase company costs for new servers that must be based in those countries but also cut demand for U.S. workers -- a scenario tech companies like Facebook FB, Google GOOG and Yahoo YHOO want to avoid. Indeed, executives like Schmidt and Stretch have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.

Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch contended the practice creates other problems beyond financial like slower service and new security loopholes, among others.

“The Internet is a medium without borders, and the notion you'd have to place data and data centers used to serve particular countries within the region is fundamentally at odds with the way the Internet is architected,” he argued, saying the result would be a Web that is slower and less personalized.

Schmidt echoed those comments, saying “I think the simplest outcome is we're going to end up breaking the Internet.”

On Thursday, Alex Stamos, a security researcher for Yahoo YHOO announced the company would develop an encrypted email system that will let users send messages to other Yahoo users, as well as Gmail users, that only the sender and recipient can read. This enhanced form of security will begin rolling out as an option for users in the fall.

Yahoo’s security measures follow on the heels of recent steps by Google GOOG to encrypt users’ email. According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo will rely on a kind of PGP encryption, which hasn’t been cracked. Previously, most email services stored data like user names and passwords, but PGP goes one step further by storing unique security keys on users’ actual devices.

Yahoo and Google offer the two most widely-used email services on the Web today, accounting for 600 million-plus users combined, according to ComScore. The news that both companies plan to encrypt email marks a significant effort to ramp up security after Edward Snowden leaked information from the National Security Agency last year revealing -- among other eye-opening secrets -- the vulnerabilities in tech companies’ data practices. Yahoo and Google’s so-called “end-to-end” encryption efforts will help protect users’ sensitive data from the prying eyes of hackers, the government, even the Webmail services themselves. Web companies are increasingly competing for users based on security and publicly bragging about their extra protections to gain an advantage, or at least keep those in place from defecting.

Google, in particular, isn’t stopping with email. On Wednesday, the company disclosed in a blog post that it is now taking into account whether Web sites use encrypted HTTPS connections, and that those that do could appear higher in Google search results.

“For now it’s only a very lightweight signal -- affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content -- while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS,” wrote Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, both of whom are webmaster trends analysts for Google.

Regardless, the long-term message is abundantly clear: the more secure your site, the better your search ranking and the higher your chances of increased Internet traffic. Eventually, the webmaster and the web surfer wins.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/08/07/yahoo-like-google-plans-encrypted-email/feed/0131211172046-yahoo-mail-down-620xa1JP MangalindanBox CEO: The economic case for a global Internethttp://fortune.com/2014/07/21/box-ceo-the-economic-case-for-a-global-internet/
http://fortune.com/2014/07/21/box-ceo-the-economic-case-for-a-global-internet/#commentsMon, 21 Jul 2014 14:25:57 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=750246]]>The Internet as we know it is synonymous with universality, a quality that has sustained since the creation of the World Wide Web. As the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, describes it: “No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the Web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure. This has also been critical to the Web's growth and is critical to its future.”

But today, there is a very real risk of this universality going away.

Recently, I attended a meeting with government officials and business executives about the issues surrounding the recent National Security Agency scandals. We had an in-depth conversation about the challenges the corporate and public sectors face in determining how to balance upholding the sanctity of the Internet with the need of the U.S. government to protect its citizens.

Unsurprisingly, this topic is extremely complex. And as with most arguments, there are many instances where each side doesn't always understand the other, at least initially. The government's requests for data from technology providers has occurred far less than at least some popular stories and reports would suggest. But, equally, the U.S. administration has likely underestimated the damage recent revelations have caused for service providers doing business abroad. The mere potential for impropriety, regardless of what the facts may be, can drive foreign governments, companies and citizens to take pause.

It has already begun. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff championed a bill that would require that substantial user Internet data be kept within the country (this was eventually dismissed as technically infeasible). Germany and France have initiated similar conversations, with Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel suggesting that, “one could build up a communication network inside Europe.” Even the German parliament has confirmed it’s looking into using non-electronic typewriters to avoid moving important communications over the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee must be cringing.

Some of this is unrealistic political posturing, but all of it is bad for the progress of the Internet. In the face of the obvious and important privacy implications that fill most of the news stories, we've nearly forgotten the economic consequences.

The power of the Internet rests in its ability to be a universal and global medium. It spans nearly all nations and belongs to no single country. And as the world continues to become more globalized, the Internet’s role as a trusted and secure backbone for communication, commerce and collaboration is more important than ever before.

As we transition from the industrial age to the information age, geographical boundaries are shrinking. The competitive advantage companies once built up by concentrating on individual regions crumbles in an interconnected world. No company can merely transact with local suppliers and partners — and if it does, it will be at a steep disadvantage. Nations that don’t embrace this trend halt their own progress.

The fabric that binds us all in this new economy is the Internet.

The Internet is the broker for individuals that want to earn extra income by renting out a spare room on Airbnb; it’s the marketplace for the small businesses in China that want to sell their products around the globe on Alibaba; and it’s the tissue that connects the partners, suppliers and customers of global organizations like GE. Whether you’re an individual, small business, or one of the world’s largest enterprises, the Internet increasingly is driving your economic opportunity, and making that opportunity global.

The Internet singularly enables this flatness, and it should be connecting the world, not separating it. The last thing we can afford is a balkanization of the web, yet we run this risk if things continue on their current track.

For its part, the Obama administration seems motivated to tackle these challenges. But that won’t be enough. What's needed is a discussion that transcends the interests of a single nation: we need multilateral discussions on the future of the Internet and governments’ role in protecting (and policing) it. The U.S. government may have started this chain reaction, but it will require far more than the U.S. government to halt it.

There are many ways of tackling this, and none of them will be easy. What is ultimately needed is a set of international standards, rules or operating principles that major governments, corporations and privacy advocates buy into. This wouldn’t be without precedent, as many commercial and economically-critical multinational interests like airspace, maritime and energy laws are governed by the United Nations. This clearly moves the power away from any single government and brings more trust back into the system.

What must be avoided, at all costs, is a balkanized approach to Internet policing, where each government is on its own without regard for the collective.

For the next two decades of the Internet to be as good as the last two, things need to change. I'm hopeful that this will be an ongoing dialogue as we move towards fulfilling the promise of an Internet that connects the world and powers the global economy.

Aaron Levie is co-founder and CEO of Box, an online content sharing and collaboration service for businesses.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/07/21/box-ceo-the-economic-case-for-a-global-internet/feed/0183072549nt2192Germany nulls Verizon contract over U.S. government surveillancehttp://fortune.com/2014/06/26/germany-verizon/
http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/germany-verizon/#commentsThu, 26 Jun 2014 23:08:15 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=732485]]>Germany’s government said Thursday it has cancelled a network infrastructure contract with Verizon Communications after recent revelations about U.S. surveillance of foreign governments.

News reports based on documents provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have detailed U.S. spying on foreign countries including tapped the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Talks between the two countries to reach a “no-spy” agreement fell apart earlier this year.

“The pressures on networks as well as the risks from highly developed viruses or Trojans are rising,” Germany’s Interior Ministry said in a statement Thursday. “Furthermore, the ties revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms in the wake of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) affair show that the German government needs a very high level of security for its critical networks.”

Germany said it has plans to totally overhaul its communications network to ensure its security, with German company Deutsche Telekom taking over for Verizon. The contract with Verizon VZ, which was put in place in 2010, was set to expire next year.

Several news outlets have reported that Detlef Eppig, the head of Verizon’s German unit, has said that the unit has always acted in compliance with German law.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/germany-verizon/feed/0Image (1) verizon_cloud.jpg for post 327561huddlestontomSnapchat: The NSA’s worst enemy?http://fortune.com/2014/06/10/snapchat-the-nsas-worst-enemy/
http://fortune.com/2014/06/10/snapchat-the-nsas-worst-enemy/#commentsTue, 10 Jun 2014 13:39:47 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=636426]]>It’s clear anonymous social networks are growing quickly: Whisper has drawn 2.5 billion page views a month, while Secret has 3.5 billion page views; Snapchat has attracted 26 million users. Some call them online confessionals, others believe they're merely a millennial fad, and most just see them as vehicles for inappropriate commentary. While that may be the case now, the noise will eventually die down. And more importantly, there is a larger lesson to be learned for companies looking to soon capitalize on this new and active audience. Like traditional social networks once were, anonymous ones are in their infancy, and the potential for services like Whisper is huge because there is legitimacy behind what people are saying.

There's a strong need for enterprises to be able to capture public input in a place where customers feel safe in order to turn that feedback into action. But, before that can be done, let's look at why anonymous social networks are taking off.

This month marks the one-year anniversary when documents leaked by Edward Snowden began popping up in the Guardian and the Washington Post. Following the scandal and stories surrounding the National Security Agency and other government surveillance programs, customers are more reluctant than before to share private information. While the debate rages on, anonymous social networks make it easy for online users to feel safer about sharing their opinion. Not only will their information be private, but the information shared will never link back to them. There is no one to hold a user accountable for what comes out of their keyboard, creating the perfect platform for a safe sharing environment.

Before Snapchat came along, sharing photos and videos was limited to sites, services, and applications that encouraged ongoing information sharing. People created a trail, and that trail was linkable to other networks for an easy registration option. More often than not, that information was then sold to businesses for target advertising. For users that don't want to risk leaving a trail for fear of creating an online legacy, or allowing strangers into their personal information, anonymous social networks are the ultimate social media solution. Furthermore, staying anonymous online is the perfect recipe for sites like 7 Cups of Tea that offer anonymous therapy.

If not for anonymous social networks, where else can users be truly honest and yet heard without being somehow profiled? There is some truth to the online confessional claim, but from a business perspective, it's an asset not yet capitalized on. A perfect example of honesty, as Secret co-founder and CEO David Byttow put it, is “People go on Facebook and say they just got engaged. But what you don’t see is ‘I am going to propose today.'" As humans, we're social animals and we want to share (hence the rise of Facebook, Instagram and so on), but sometimes we just can't.

When Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram first launched, few understood the purpose behind the social sharing sites and hardly anyone believed that they were more than a place for self-expression and narcissism. But it's much clearer today that Facebook is valuable--it's a leader in display advertising, raking in $2.75 billion in 2013. Instagram ads, just six months old and limited to a select group of 15 brands, are already showing promising results, according to data given to Adweek by the social photo-sharing site.

People and companies alike aren't sure just what to do yet with anonymous social networks, but as Facebook FB, Twitter TWTR and the like history shows, their usage will soon explode and companies will have to be in the wings, quick to leverage for marketing efforts.

Over the last decade, the convergence of social, mobile, and cloud technologies has resulted in extremely informed customers. Before ever engaging with a company, customers know almost everything they need to, leading to massive changes in the way they buy. Customers are no longer passive observers–they've become active participants, educating themselves about products prior to making a purchase via social media and online review sites.

Still, there are many customers who fear where their information is going and how it's being used. Anonymous social networks provide protection–a shelter for unsolicited information that won't be used for advertising or surveillance; businesses have to start taking anonymous social networks seriously by listening and acting on the feedback.

There's also an opportunity to capitalize on these networks from a marketing perspective--just think of all the conversations a business can start and information it can capture. On the one hand, businesses can create accounts and tune into what people are saying. Are they complaining about a brand, or are they happy with it? Do parts of a product need changing? Does customer service need improvement?

Sometimes it doesn't matter just who is saying these things, it only matters if it's honest. On the other hand, businesses can also create discussion. Perhaps a retailer wants to know what customers think about a hot new color this season. All they have to do is begin conversation and see people react. While there is big potential in this type of approach, ambiguity remains.

That's why at the same time, businesses should begin working with their customers directly, enabling them to share amongst themselves and with a company via an insight community, a secure online environment where customers feel comfortable that their information isn't misused, sold elsewhere, or exploited.

Andrew Reid is the founder, president, and chief product officer of Vision Critical, a cloud-based customer-intelligence platform provider that is based in Vancouver. Follow him @reidandrew

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/06/10/snapchat-the-nsas-worst-enemy/feed/0188019680nt2192Condoleezza Rice calls Edward Snowden ‘a traitor’http://fortune.com/2014/05/14/condoleezza-rice-calls-edward-snowden-a-traitor/
http://fortune.com/2014/05/14/condoleezza-rice-calls-edward-snowden-a-traitor/#commentsWed, 14 May 2014 21:24:44 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/?p=352383]]>FORTUNE — Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice isn't a fan of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked a trove of classified documents detailing widespread spying by the U.S government on its citizens and allies.

"I have absolutely no respect for him," she said Wednesday at Venture Scape, the National Venture Capital Association's annual convention in San Francisco. "He's not a hero, he's a traitor."

Rice, who also served as President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor, insisted that Snowden should have gone through proper channels to report any illegal surveillance instead of going to the media. Challenged about whether the agencies would have reacted to his concerns, she demurred, saying "at least he could have tried."

"Edward Snowden didn't go to work for Disney," Rice said. "What did he think the N.S.A. did?"

Critics of the surveillance program scoff at the idea that Snowden or anyone else could have prompted a serious review of government spying through internal channels. Several members of Congress who supposedly monitored the programs have said that they were largely in dark about most of its details or lied to about the extent of the surveillance.

Rice is a polarizing figure who invariably raises the blood pressure of opponents. She played a major role in the Iraq War and the huge expansion of government surveillance, including warrantless wiretaps.

Snowden's leaks, she said, gave a confusing picture of U.S. spying that even she couldn't understand. "If I can't figure out what s going on, I can guarantee you most people can’t figure out what's going on," she said. Still, Rice gave qualified support to a review of the current surveillance policies because, as she put it, such programs tend to go "on auto-pilot."

"I don't rule out the possibility that there needed to be a review or culling or stopping some of these programs," Rice said. "But how you get that done is you don't do it by leaking to the Guardian or Washington Post."

As for Snowden, who is currently in exile in Russia, Rice said he had better watch his back. Russia, which gave Snowden a temporary visa after U.S. officials withdrew his passport, doesn’t like traitors either, she said.

“If I were Edward Snowden, I’d watch what I eat,” Rice said.

Rice's track record - particularly the surveillance part - came back to haunt her last month when Dropbox, the online file storage service, named her to its board. Users of the service attacked the company for appointing someone so closely tied to government surveillance and raised concerns about the service's commitment to privacy.

In response to the uproar, Drew Houston, Dropbox's chief executive, took to his company's blog to defend Rice and her appointment.

"There's nothing more important to us than keeping your stuff safe and secure," he wrote. "It's why we've been fighting for transparency and government surveillance reform, and why we've been vocal and public with our principles and values."

Asked about her new role at Dropbox, Rice praised the company and its management, but didn't address the privacy concerns involving her other than to say that privacy issues are hard and companies like Dropbox are struggling with very important issues.

Earlier this week, Rice's past flared up again when students and faculty at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, expressed outrage at her being chosen as commencement speaker. To defuse the situation, Rice cancelled her scheduled address.

Venture capitalists filling the room at VentureScape, the annual conference of the National Venture Capital Association, gave Rice a far warmer welcome. No one held up protest signs or jeered. In fact, Rice spoke to the choir in terms of her support for immigration reform. Silicon Valley companies widely support the effort, which would make it easier to import engineers and attract foreign entrepreneurs.

But despite intense lobbying by business interests, the immigration bill is stalled in Congress over opposition by House Republicans. They want to revise a Senate bill that would give undocumented immigrants a path to getting U.S. citizenship.

Rice, who has held a number of roles at Stanford University and is currently a professor of political science there, couched the problem in simple terms: You don't want to chase off someone who just graduated from Stanford.